One of the newest trends to emerge as of late is how graphics cards are in high demand. This is mainly due to more people getting involved in mining altcoins. More specifically, users use AMD and NVIDIA GPUs to mine Ether, Dash, ZCash, and Monero, among other currencies. Sapphire is now trying to tackle this market with their brand new line of graphics cards. It is an interesting development, to say the least.
It was a matter of time until we would see dedicated cryptocurrency mining graphics cards. Albeit AMD and NVIDIA cards are well suited for this purpose already, the shortages are causing issues. More specifically, people looking to build their own PC can’t buy a proper graphics card in most countries. This is due to cryptocurrency miners buying up all of the supplies. That situation will now come to change, thanks to Sapphire. In fact, the company unveiled 5 different cryptocurrency mining graphics cards.
Sapphire Enters the Cryptocurrency Mining GPU Market
More specifically, these cards are now available for pre-order in the United Kingdom. It is expected other sites will offer these cards in the future as well. Paying for these cards with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies would make a lot of sense, to say the least. The “Mining Edition” of these cards have no display outputs, except for the Radeon RX 560. Headless cards work just fine for cryptocurrency mining, as they will not be connected to a display anytime soon.
More importantly, the new Sapphire cards grant better performance. Compared to the current Elpida chipset, the new Sapphire mining edition cards allow miners to squeeze out an additional 2-3MH/s out of every card. For people running a farm with 50 of these cards, that is a massive improvement. More performance at an affordable price will be impossible to ignore. Do keep in mind these new cryptocurrency mining GPUs come at a premium price. That is to be expected, though.
It is good to see Sapphire make some inroads in this regard. It was a matter of time until we would see dedicated cryptocurrency mining cards from either AMD or NVIDIA. Do keep in mind the mining cards have a one-year warranty only. It is also doubtful these cards can be resold easily. They don’t have a display out connection, which can be a deal breaker for gamers. It will be interesting to see how many of these cards are sold in a few months from now.
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